“New Work (from 2007) – Chuck Close, Justine Kurland, Ryan McGinness” – presents three disparate bodies of work by three of today’s most productive contemporary artists. While the work being shown could be loosely joined by its connection to nature, the focus of the show is more on how this diverse trio of artists each bring their trademark style to the creation of new work – presenting their own singular visions while expanding the boundaries of their oeuvre.

In this show, the always innovative Chuck Close experiments with both subject and medium. In his first pictures of nature – three images of flowers and two of grapes – Close’s work forces the viewer to pay attention not only to the object being photographed, but to the very process of creation. In these five new pieces, Close references the daguerreotypes of nineteenth century portraiture, the subject matter of classical painting, and finally his own photorealistic works. Combining and sampling both old and new technology the resulting images are at once striking and beautiful, modern and timeless.

In contrast, Justine Kurland uses the rugged landscape of the American Northwest as a stage for her photographs, constructing an optimistic fantasy of living in harmony with nature even as the world becomes more unsettling. The images use as points of reference the spiritual narrative of the fall of man, the art historical depiction of mother and child, and the search for the metaphorical Garden of Eden. The resulting large color pictures of nude women and children dwarfed by the natural world create a modern pictorial twist on the 19th century landscape photographs intended to lure settlers to the west.

Lastly, Ryan McGinness has, over the last decade, created a unique body of work based on a self-created visual language of icons, abstract shapes, and color forms. An idiosyncratic marriage of abstraction and representation, McGinness’s colorful paintings and silkscreens consist of a finite selection of forms composed and layered in constantly varying combinations. In the new series shown here, the shapes play not only with the similarity of the form of ice cream cones and trees, but also with ideas of sweetness and decoration and the response to such ideas in today’s hyped-up art world.

Danziger Projects would like to both thank and acknowledge the help of Adamson Editions – Chuck Close’s longtime photographic printer and publisher; Jay Gorney of Mitchell Innes and Nash – Justine Kurland’s longtime gallery director; and the non-profit Lower East Side Printshop – who provided the residency during which McGinness created the work for this show.